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The highest-paid public university president last year, James Ramsey, 69, of the University of Louisville, made a total of $4.3 million, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s eighth annual survey of public university presidents’ compensation. That’s $2.5 million more than the next-highest-paid president, Jay Gogue of Auburn University in Alabama, and $3.7 million more than the $560,000 average compensation of the other 250 presidents in the survey, which showed average pay climbed 5% from the previous year.

Good thing for Ramsey that he has plenty of cash on hand. U of L forced him out in July 2016, and he is facing a lawsuit that charges him with breach of fiduciary duty, fraudulent appropriations and improper diversion of funds for personal gain. Ramsey’s lawyer, former lieutenant governor of Kentucky Stephen Pence, calls the suit “unfounded.”

An economics Ph.D. who had been president since 2002, Ramsey is credited with turning U of L from a commuter school into a residential campus. He also doubled federal research funding. With an undergraduate population of nearly 16,000, U of L ranked No. 139 on Forbes’ list of top public colleges last year.

But over the last several years, Ramsey and U of L have been mired in scandal. From 2010 to 2014, a university staffer paid for strippers to perform and have sex with members of the men's basketball team. The team won the 2013 championship, but the NCAA revoked the title this year after learning about the strippers. Then, at a 2015 Halloween party, Ramsey and his wife dressed up as Mexicans wearing sombreros and fake mustaches and shaking maracas (Ramsey later apologized). In yet another debacle, university staffers were convicted on embezzlement charges.

Why was Ramsey paid so much? Dan Bauman, the Chronicle reporter who put together the list, says Ramsey’s pay deal remains murky. The Chronicle’s table lists him as earning base pay of only $55,703 for the 27 days he worked in the 2016-17 fiscal year, and $4,233,739 in “other pay.” Bauman believes that most of that came in the form of deferred compensation, a pay arrangement among university heads that has become increasingly popular.

On the theory that presidents are more effective the longer they stay on the job, deferred comp deals reward presidents for longevity, often at a set dollar amount per year. The money is set aside tax-free. Sometimes the president collects the deferred pay at a designated interval, like five years. Other times they collect at the end of their tenure, which seems to have been what happened in Ramsey’s case. Though Ramsey has been scrutinized for high pay in the past.

In 2015, the Courier-Journal in Louisville ran a story, “Ramsey’s Pay at U of L Dwarfs Others in ACC,” where it noted that Ramsey made more than $1.6 million, 53% more than the president of Duke. (That story noted the contrast with Boston College president William Leahy, a Jesuit priest, who took a vow of poverty and drew a paycheck of $0.)

Ramsey also benefited from an arrangement that exists at many universities in which the president is paid in part from the university’s coffers and in part from a nonprofit foundation set up to collect donations from private individuals. The foundations can be controversial because their financial records are often opaque and, in Ramsey’s case, according to the suit filed against him, misused. Since Ramsey served as president of U of L’s foundation, did he decide on his own compensation? “That’s in the courts,” says the Chronicle’s Bauman.

Ramsey also benefited from a lump sum buyout of $690,542 when he stepped down in 2016, equal to one year of his base salary and one year of administrative leave.

Gogue, 71, who made $1.8 million, is also no longer on the job at Auburn. He left in May 2017 at the end of 11 years, after steering Auburn through the financial crisis and improving graduation rates. According to the Chronicle’s figures, Gogue’s base pay was $451,000. The Chronicle lists the remainder of his compensation as “other pay,” which was likely deferred compensation.

No. 3 on the list is William H. McRaven, 62, who is still on the job as chancellor of the University of Texas system. He made $1.5 million, including base pay of $1.2 million and a bonus of $300,000.

The highest-paid woman on the Chronicle’s list: Judy L. Genshaft, 70, of the University of South Florida, who made $1,184,520.

One striking note about Ramsey’s $4.3 million payday: It puts his compensation above the highest-paid private university president in the Chronicle’s most recent tally, for 2015, when Nathan O. Hatch of Wake Forest made $4,004,617. Though neither Hatch nor Ramsey matched the highest-paid public school president since the Chronicle has been running its tally, E. Gordon Gee, who made $5.03 million in his last year at Ohio State University, fiscal 2013.

“I don’t think the public is fully aware of how much presidents are making from these deferred compensation deals,” says Bauman.

Here are the 10 highest-paid public university presidents on The Chronicle's list:

In February 2018, I took on a new job managing and writing Forbes' education coverage. I'd spent the previous two years on the Entrepreneurs team, following six years

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In February 2018, I took on a new job managing and writing Forbes' education coverage. I'd spent the previous two years on the Entrepreneurs team, following six years writing for the Leadership channel. My mission with education is to explore the intersection of education and business. I'm
recruiting contributors and also looking for my own stories. I’ve been at Forbes since 1995, writing about everything from books to billionaires. Among my favorite stories: South Africa’s first black billionaire, Patrice Motsepe, and British diamond jewelry mogul Laurence Graff, both of whom built their vast fortunes from nothing. At Forbes magazine I also did a stint editing the lifestyle section and I used to edit opinion pieces by the likes of John Bogle and Gordon Bethune. I got my job at Forbes through a brilliant libertarian economist, Susan Lee, whom I used to put on television at MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Before that I covered law and lawyers for journalistic stickler, harsh taskmaster and the best teacher a young reporter could have had, Steven Brill.